Categories

POST # 9

People who become blind after birth can see images in their dreams. People who are born blind do not see any images, but have dreams equally vivid involving their other senses of sound, smell, touch and emotion.

2) You Forget 90% of your Dreams

Within 5 minutes of waking, half of your dream if forgotten. Within 10, 90% is gone.

3) Everybody Dreams

Every human being dreams unless you suffer from an extreme psychological disorder, but men and women have different dreams and different physical reactions. Men tend to dream more about other men, while women tend to dream equally about men and women. In addition, both men and women experience sexually related physical reactions to their dreams regardless of whether the dream is sexual in nature; males experience erections and females experience increased vaginal blood flow.

4) Dreams Prevent Psychosis

In a recent sleep study, students who were awakened at the beginning of each dream, but still allowed their 8 hours of sleep, all experienced difficulty in concentration, irritability, hallucinations, and signs of psychosis after only 3 days. When finally allowed their REM sleep the student’s brains made up for lost time by greatly increasing the percentage of sleep spent in the REM stage.

5) We Only Dream of What We Know

Our dreams are frequently full of strangers who play out certain parts –your mind is not inventing those faces – they are real faces of real people that you have seen during your life but may not know or remember.

6) Not Everyone Dreams in Color

A full 12% of sighted people dream exclusively in black and white. The remaining number dream in full color. People also tend to have common themes in dreams, which are situations relating to school, being chased, running slowly/in place, sexual experiences, falling, arriving too late, a person now alive being dead, teeth falling out, flying, failing an examination, or a car accident. It is unknown whether the impact of a dream relating to violence or death is more emotionally charged for a person who dreams in color than one who dreams in black and white.

7) Dreams are not about what they are about

If you dream about some particular subject it is not often that the dream is about that. Dreams speak in a deeply symbolic language. The unconscious mind tries to compare your dream to something else, which is similar. Its like writing a poem and saying that a group of ants were like machines that never stop. But you would never compare something to it. So whatever symbol your dream picks on it is most unlikely to be a symbol for itself.

8) Quitters have more vivid dreams

People who have smoked cigarettes for a long time who stop, have reported much more vivid dreams than they would normally experience.

9) External Stimuli Invade our Dreams

This is called Dream Incorporation and it is the experience that most of us have had where a sound from reality is heard in our dream and incorporated in some way. A similar (though less external) example would be when you are physically thirsty and your mind incorporates that feeling in to your dream.

10) You are paralyzed while you sleep

Believe it or not, your body is virtually paralyzed during your sleep – most likely to prevent your body from acting out aspects of your dreams.